Byvают такие крылатые слова, которые с удивительной меткостью выражают сущность довольно сложных явлений. К числу таких слов принадлежит, несомненно, изречение одного из помещиков, членов правого большинства Государственной думы, по поводу речи Горемыкина в историческом заседании Думы 22-го апреля.

There are certain winged words that with remarkable precision express the essence of rather complex phenomena. To the number of such words belongs, without doubt, the saying of one of the landowners, members of the right majority of the State Duma, concerning Goremykin's speech at the historic session of the Duma on April 22nd.

"How pleasant it would be to have I. L. Goremykin as a neighbor on one's estate!"

These words, spoken on the day when working-class and peasant deputies were expelled from the State Duma, are most useful to recall now, when the expelled deputies have again taken their seats. These words brilliantly depict the force with which democracy is confronted both in the Duma and outside of it.

The petit nobleman who threw out this winged mot wanted to make a joke, but accidentally spoke a serious truth, one deeper than he intended to speak. Indeed, what is this entire Fourth Duma, what is all this majority of rightists and Octobrists, and then the "dignitaries" in the State Council, if not "estate neighbors"?

In Russia, in the possession of 194 Privy Councillors, there are 3,103,579 desyatinas of land, that is, on average more than twenty thousand desyatinas per Privy Councillor.[21] And in total, Russia's largest landowners, numbering fewer than 30,000, possess 70 million desyatinas of land. In the hands of precisely this class lies the majority of both the State Duma and the State Council and the highest bureaucracy, not to mention the zemstvos and local administration. All these are "estate neighbors."

"Estate neighbors" in our capitalist age increasingly become factory owners, distillers, sugar manufacturers, and so forth, take ever greater participation in all manner of commercial-industrial, financial, and railroad enterprises. The highest nobility becomes tightly interwoven with the highest bourgeoisie.

"Estate neighbors" represent the finest class organization in Russia, because they are organized not only as neighbors, not only in associations, but also as a state force. All the most important institutions are occupied by them, constructed "in their image and likeness," corresponding to their "needs" and interests. Of course, there are also very significant peculiarities of our state system, explained by Russia's military history and so forth—peculiarities capable of sometimes giving rise to discontent even among the landowner class. But all the same, on the whole, what a splendid example of class organization do the Great Russian landowners provide!

Our bourgeoisie makes poor use of this example, fearing, for instance, to even think about organizing its class into a state force. But the proletariat, in organizing itself as a class, has never forgotten and will never forget the magnificent example of the "estate neighbors"…

*Put Pravdy* No. 80, May 8, 1914

Published according to the text of the newspaper *Put Pravdy*